To a certain extent, you know what you’re getting with a Colin Dexter book. Here, we follow Inspector Morse as he investigates a murder that took place on New Year’s Eve at a hotel. The hotel had recently undergone some redevelopment, and so some of the guests were staying in a small annexe off to the side of it. Morse is tasked with finding out what happened inside the titular third annexe, and rest assured that there are plenty of twists and turns along the way.

The characters are good enough, but not particularly memorable – that seems to happen a lot in detectivenovels, for some reasons. It’s because they’re so human, and so dispensable – they have their foibles, like we all do, and whilst the story is largely experienced through the relationships between each of the characters, once it’s over they seem to fade away.

Still, Morse and Lewis are at their strongest here, and the locations that are featured feel both believable and real, as though you yourself are walking amongst them. In many ways, it helps to draw you, as the reader, into the story, and so you’re able to try to solve the mystery yourself. And, like all good mystery novels, it keeps you guessing along the way, and – for me, at least – it’d be easy to re-read it, and to get drawn back into the storyline.

Overall, then, this was probably one of my favourites of the Inspector Morse novels, and it seems as good a book as any for you to get started with. The writing is swift and easy going, and it leaves you feeling satisfied when you get to the end of it. What more could you ask for?